A documentation and review of limited time, special edition, or otherwise hard-to-find noms.
Product circa: 2016 and intermittently after
One of the shining examples on how junk food is made to taste like complex cuisine, and cheeseburgers are often the subject of these successes. Individually, your tongue with detect distinct flavors of charred beef, cheese, onion, mustard, and pickle. Add to this a very salty delivery, and it's one of the best potato chips (if you can call it that) that I've ever tasted.
Product circa: 2020
You love to see cross-branding like this. Unfortunately, these come across as a little one-dimensional.
Despite not having any meat products in these, the first and most prominent flavor is smoky pork. After that… really nothing. No beef or cheese… which, it seems, is literally all that is in a Wendy’s Baconator. The ingredients list boasts things like spices, cheese powder, and tomato powder, but I don’t get any of it. Just smoky pork rind-like powder, and that’s it. It could be part of how old this can is, though it was air-sealed and is in great condition.
I'm not sure if these are regional to here in South Florida or if these are available nationally.
HALLELUJAH there is beef flavoring in these chips, and it shows. They lead strongly with a flavored of steak, specifically charred steak. Next up is heavy black pepper. There are the typical aromatics like onion and garlic, and a hint of parsley which is boosted by some vinegar powder.
These are good, but they probably should have been marketed as some other product/flavoring, like "Steakhouse" or something. If they want to mimic chimichurri, they need to get bolder on the botanicals, like parsley, garlic, chile, and citrus.
Product circa: 2025
I'm fairly certain that this product was released many years ago, but I can't recall if I tried it back then.
A fairly complicated mix of many different flavors. There is no meat in the ingredients, but there is cumin, coriander, onion, and garlic, which do a pretty decent job at simulating the flavor of the type of seasoned ground beef you'd find in tacos. There is tomato powder in this, but I don't taste it. I do, however, get a bit of the regular cheese powder thrown in here as well. Very good!
Note: This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom
Product circa: 2025
Though I never posted it on this site, some 15+ years ago I recall having this same product. It was a revelation. Each component of a cheeseburger could be parsed from the taste of the product: beef, cheese, tomato, onion, mustard, pickle, and even lettuce.
While I commend that this product actually has beef in the ingredients list, this still doesn't quite measure up to the older version. At first bite, the beef, cheese, and pickle immediate produce the cheeseburger "vibe". Aside from the additional onion, and perhaps mustard, that's where this product stops. It's still delicious, though.
